The Shallows (30 page)

31.
J. Z. Young,
Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain
(London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 101.

32.
Books also introduced a new set of tools for organizing and conveying information. As Jack Goody has shown, lists, tables, formulas, and recipes became commonplace as books proliferated. Such literary devices further deepened our thinking, providing ways to classify and explain phenomena with ever-greater precision. Goody writes that “it does not require much reflection upon the contents of a book to realize the transformation in communication that writing has made, not simply in a mechanical sense, but in a cognitive one, what we can do with our minds and what our minds can do with us.” Goody,
The Domestication of the Savage Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 160.

33.
Darnton points out that the radically democratic and meritocratic Republic of Letters was an ideal that would never be fully realized, but as an ideal it had great force in shaping people’s conception of themselves and their culture. Robert Darnton, “Google and the Future of Books,”
New York Review of Books
, February 12, 2009.

34.
David M. Levy,
Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
(New York: Arcade, 2001), 104. The italics are Levy’s.

35.
Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,”
Psychological Science
, 20, no. 8 (2009): 989–99. Gerry Everding, “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of Narrative Situations, Brain Scans Suggest,” Washington University (St. Louis) Web site, January 26, 2009, http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/13325.html.

36.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,”
Dial
, October 1840.

37.
Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, 8.

38.
Eisenstein,
Printing Press as an Agent of Change
, 152.

39.
Wolf,
Proust and the Squid
, 217–18.

40.
Some people have suggested that communication on the Internet, which tends to be brief, informal, and conversational, will return us to an oral culture. But that seems unlikely for many reasons, the most important being that the communication does not take place in person, as it does in oral cultures, but rather through a technological intermediary. Digital messages are disembodied. “The oral word,” wrote Walter Ong, “never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived, but is natural and even inevitable.” Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, 67–68.

41.
Ibid., 80.

a digression
ON LEE DE FOREST AND HIS AMAZING AUDION

1.
Public Broadcasting System, “A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Lee de Forest,” undated, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/btfore. html. For an excellent review of de Forest’s early career and accomplishments, see Hugh G. J. Aitken,
The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900–1932
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 162–249. For de Forest’s own take on his life, see
Father of the Radio: The Autobiography of Lee de Forest
(Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1950).

2.
Aitken,
Continuous Wave
, 217.

3.
Lee de Forest, “Dawn of the Electronic Age,”
Popular Mechanics
, January 1952.

Five
A MEDIUM OF THE MOST GENERAL NATURE

1.
Andrew Hodges, “Alan Turing,” in
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, Fall 2008 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall 2008/entries/turing.

2.
Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entsheidungsproblem,”
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society
, 42, no. 1 (1937): 230–65.

3.
Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
Mind
, 59 (October 1950): 433–60.

4.
George B. Dyson,
Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 40.

5.
Nicholas G. Carr,
Does IT Matter?
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 79.

6.
K. G. Coffman and A. M. Odlyzko, “Growth of the Internet,” AT&T Labs monograph, July 6, 2001, www.dtc.umn.edu/%7Eodlyzko/ doc/oft.internet.growth.pdf.

7.
Forrester Research, “Consumers’ Behavior Online: A 2007 Deep Dive,” April 18, 2008, www.forrester.com/Research/ Document/0,7211,45266,00.html.

8.
Forrester Research, “Consumer Behavior Online: A 2009 Deep Dive,” July 27, 2009, www.forrester.com/Research/ Document/0,7211,54327,00.html.

9.
Nielsen Company, “Time Spent Online among Kids Increases 63 Percent in the Last Five Years, According to Nielsen,” media alert, July 6, 2009, www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090706.pdf.

10.
Forrester Research, “A Deep Dive into European Consumers’ Online Behavior, 2009,” August 13, 2009, www.forrester.com/Research/Doc ument/0,7211,54524,00.html.

11.
TNS Global, “Digital World, Digital Life,” December 2008, www.tnsglobal.com/_assets/ files/TNS_Market_Research_ Digital_World_Digital_Life.pdf.

12.
Nielsen Company, “Texting Now More Popular than Calling,” news release, September 22, 2008, www.nielsenmobile.com/html/press%20 releases/TextsVersusCalls.html; Eric Zeman, “U.S. Teens Sent 2,272 Text Messages per Month in 4Q08,”
Over the Air
blog (
InformationWeek
), May 26, 2009, www.informationweek.com/blog/ main/archives/2009/05/us_ teens_sent_2.html.

13.
Steven Cherry, “thx 4 the revnu,”
IEEE Spectrum
, October 2008.

14.
Sara Rimer, “Play with Your Food, Just Don’t Text!”
New York Times
, May 26, 2009.

15.
Nielsen Company, “A2/M2 Three Screen Report: 1st Quarter 2009,” May 20, 2009, http://blog.nielsen.com/ nielsenwire/wp-content/ uploads/2009/05/ nielsen_threescreenreport_q109.pdf.

16.
Forrester Research, “How European Teens Consume Media,” December 4, 2009, www.forrester.com/rb/Research /how_european_teens_ consume_media/q/id/ 53763/t/2.

17.
Heidi Dawley, “Time-wise, Internet Is Now TV’s Equal,”
Media Life
, February 1, 2006.

18.
Council for Research Excellence, “The Video Consumer Mapping Study,” March 26, 2009, www.researchexcellence.com/ vcm_overview.pdf.

19.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “American Time Use Survey,” 2004–2008, www.bls.gov/tus/.

20.
Noreen O’Leary, “Welcome to My World,”
Adweek
, November 17, 2008.

21.
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
, critical ed., ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 2003), 237.

22.
Anne Mangen, “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion,”
Journal of Research in Reading
, 31, no. 4 (2008): 404–19.

23.
Cory Doctorow, “Writing in the Age of Distraction,”
Locus
, January 2009.

24.
Ben Sisario, “Music Sales Fell in 2008, but Climbed on the Web,”
New York Times
, December 31, 2008.

25.
Ronald Grover, “Hollywood Is Worried as DVD Sales Slow,”
BusinessWeek
, February 19, 2009; Richard Corliss, “Why Netflix Stinks,”
Time
, August 10, 2009.

26.
Chrystal Szeto, “U.S. Greeting Cards and Postcards,” Pitney Bowes Background Paper No. 20, November 21, 2005, www.postinsight.com/files/ Nov21_GreetingCards_Final.pdf.

27.
Brigid Schulte, “So Long, Snail Shells,”
Washington Post
, July 25, 2009.

28.
Scott Jaschik, “Farewell to the Printed Monograph,”
Inside Higher Ed
, March 23, 2009, www.insidehighered.com/ news/2009/03/23/ Michigan.

29.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Digital Textbooks Can Save Money, Improve Learning,”
Mercury News
, June 7, 2009.

30.
Tim Arango, “Fall in Newspaper Sales Accelerates to Pass 7%,”
New York Times
, April 27, 2009.

31.
David Cook, “Monitor Shifts from Print to Web-Based Strategy,”
Christian Science Monitor
, October 28, 2008.

32.
Tom Hall, “‘We Will Never Launch Another Paper,’”
PrintWeek
, February 20, 2009, www.printweek.com/news/881913/We-will-launch-paper.

33.
Tyler Cowen,
Create Your Own Economy
(New York: Dutton, 2009), 43.

34.
Michael Scherer, “Does Size Matter?,”
Columbia Journalism Review
, November/December 2002.

35.
Quoted in Carl R. Ramey,
Mass Media Unleashed
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 123.

36.
Jack Shafer, “The
Times’
New Welcome Mat,”
Slate
, April 1, 2008, www.slate.com/id/2187884.

37.
Kathleen Deveny, “Reinventing Newsweek,”
Newsweek
, May 18, 2009.

38.
Carl DiOrio, “Warners Teams with Facebook for ‘Watchmen,’”
Hollywood Reporter
, May 11, 2009, www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/ content_display/news/ e3i4b5caa365ad73b3a32b7e201b5eae9c0.

39.
Sarah McBride, “The Way We’ll Watch,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 8, 2008.

40.
Dave Itzkoff, “A Different Tweet in Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral,’”
New York Times
, July 24, 2009.

41.
Stephanie Clifford, “Texting at a Symphony? Yes, but Only to Select an Encore,”
New York Times
, May 15, 2009.

42.
The nine hundred–member Westwinds Community Church, in Jackson, Michigan, has been a pacesetter in weaving social networking into services. During sermons, congregants send messages through Twitter, and the tweets unspool on large video screens. One message sent during a 2009 service read, according to a report in
Time
magazine, “I have a hard time recognizing God in the middle of everything.” Bonnie Rochman, “Twittering in Church,”
Time
, June 1, 2009.

43.
Chrystia Freeland, “View from the Top: Eric Schmidt of Google,”
Financial Times
, May 21, 2009.

44.
John Carlo Bertot, Charles R. McClure, Carla B. Wright, et al., “Public Libraries and the Internet 2008: Study Results and Findings,” Information Institute of the Florida State University College of Information, 2008; American Library Association, “Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2008–2009,” September 25, 2009, www.ala.org/ala/research/ initiatives/plftas/ 2008_2009/librariescon nectcommunities3.pdf.